This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

As he took the stage to accept The Canadian Club of Toronto’s Canadian of the Year award in the Sheraton Hotel’s Dominion Ballroom Wednesday — a more mature occasion would be hard to imagine — he wore a sleek charcoal suit and a white open-collared shirt.

But nearly everything else about the tennis star — his appearance, his demeanor, his speech — betrayed his relatively young age.

Raonic’s name has grown stale in the low numbers of the ATP rankings, showing up with a regularity that can be numbing, even in this era of solidity atop the hierarchy of men’s tennis.

Remember when the Thornhill phenom became the highest-ranked Canadian man in singles history? That was 3½ years ago. He was 37th in the world then; now he is eighth.

He’s a fixture. Fixtures aren’t supposed to require special insurance to rent a car.

But there he is, smooth-faced, gangly, speaking in a voice that cracks every once in a while. When teenage girls from Thornhill Secondary School, his alma mater, pose for pictures with him after the ceremony, Raonic looks like he could be on his way to the prom.

Being young helps with some things, the physical stuff. Like the quad tear that forced him to pull out of a World Tour Finals event in London earlier this month — it’s healing fine, he says.

His youth also helps with a ridiculous 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. off-season training regimen, when his body becomes a mute and pliant servant.

“This is the time of year to do the dirty work,” he told Sportsnet host Evanka Osmak during a Q & A onstage. “This is the time of year to not complain, and not listen to your body too much.”

It’s not his body, however, that does most of the talking when Raonic is playing. That distinction, he says, goes to his finicky, brooding, 23-year-old brain.

And in tennis, a quiet brain helps. “I’d say 70 per cent of tennis is mental, 20 per cent is ability, and 10 per cent is being able to adapt,” he told the audience of sports executives and students. (It’s a more arithmetically sound equation than Yogi Berra’s famous adage that “baseball is 90 per cent mental and the other half is physical.”)

“My biggest challenge is myself,” he said, not referring to his quad. “At 23 years old, it’s not really easy to know yourself that well.”

Raonic, possibly too much a philosopher for his own good, is trying to know himself. And that’s not an easy task when the majority of your waking hours are spent working out and trying to generate topspin on fuzzy yellow balls.

Nor is what he’s learning uniformly helpful from a tennis perspective.

“I think sometimes I can get too down on myself during training, and that just sort of burns mental energy,” he said in a sit-down interview with the Star.

The word “panic” cropped up unusually often for an athlete.

“It was important that I had practiced perfectly,” he said. “If I was missing a lot of shots in practice that would bother me for the rest of the day, and then it would sort of be a panic.”

“At the same time,” he added, “during matches I panic a little too early.”

The yips are endemic to young players — Roger Federer, now famed for his composure, used to throw tantrums when things weren’t going his way on the court. Novak Djokovic, so fearless when closing out matches in 2014, had a reputation for choking in his youth (or his younger youth: he’s still only 27).

The good thing about being 23 is it doesn’t last. Raonic has been seeing improvement in himself — maturation. One thing he’s been working on: “It’s actually one of my favourite quotes: ‘Don’t let your biggest enemy be between your ears.’ ”

In Paris last month, during the BNP Paribas Masters, he practiced terribly, an impression confirmed by his coaches, he says. But rather than succumbing to nerves, Raonic rallied and beat Federer for the first time, earning a spot in the semi-finals.

Now he’s trying to supplant Roger and Novak — as he calls them — plus Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray: the Big Four who have ruled men’s tennis for nearly a decade, winning 36 of 39 Grand Slams since the 2005 Australian Open.

“I’m not here to wait for people to disappear and fade away,” Raonic said Wednesday. “My job, and my personality, won’t accept that. It’s about getting that and taking it from them.”

In the meantime, embracing the ambiguity that comes with his age, he’s trying to enjoy himself. A basketball fan, he played tennis with Steve Nash this summer (“he’s a scrambler”), and is managing a team in a fantasy football league with other pro tennis players, including Canadian doubles great Daniel Nestor.

Of course, the lousy thing about being 23 is that it doesn’t last. But Raonic, wise beyond his years, is relishing it for now.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com